Bananarama

In this week’s issue, Mike Peed writes about Tropical Race Four, a fungus that is threatening the world’s Cavendish banana crop. Though there are more than a thousand kinds of bananas worldwide, Peed writes,

the Cavendish represents ninety-nine per cent of the banana export market. The vast majority of banana varieties are not viable for international trade: their bunches are too small, or their skin is too thin, or their pulp is too bland. Although Cavendishes need pampering, they are the only variety that provides farmers with a high yield of palatable fruit that can endure overseas trips without ripening too quickly or bruising too easily…. In 2008, Americans ate 7.6 billion pounds of Cavendish bananas, virtually all of them imported from Latin America. Each year, we eat as many Cavendish bananas as we do apples and oranges combined.

In 1973, Berton Roueché wrote a Profile of the banana called “The Humblest Fruit,” in which he described the history of the cultivation of bananas and the fruit’s nutritional properties. “Its place in current American culture is very much like that of the hot dog and the hamburger. Everybody likes the banana, but nobody takes it seriously.” Roueché notes that “as late as the eighteen-nineties … the banana was still for many Americans a novelty and a treat,” and quotes from a 1932 memoir by Mary Ellen Chase, in which she recalls the arrival of bananas on a schooner in turn-of-the-century Boston:

It may seem impossible today to wax romantic over a bunch of bananas! But in that huge frame standing on the Golden Hunter’s deck, behind those masses of brown tropical grass, were concealed far more than bananas, delectable and desirable as they were in themselves. Therein, among the unripe, green protuberances … lay a prestige and a preëminence among our fellows which in all the years that have passed I have never been able to recapture.

Bananas were introduced to the public consciousness at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 (along with the telephone). Their popularization over the following decades was the work of the United Fruit Company (now known as Chiquita). Peed writes that

United Fruit eventually commanded ninety per cent of the American banana market, and in Latin America it became known as El Pulpo—the Octopus. When a head of state tried to thwart its progress, the company often responded with militaristic force. It clandestinely aided the 1911 coup in Honduras and the 1954 coup in Guatemala.

In his piece, Peed mentions Dan Koeppel’s book, “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World.” For more on the politics of banana cultivation in Central and South America, there is this interview Koeppel gave to NPR’s Terry Gross in 2008.

The title of Peed’s story, “We Have No Bananas,” is an allusion to the song “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” written by musicians Irving Conn and Frank Silver. In 1937, Jared L. Manley wrote a “Where Are They Now?” piece about Conn and Silver in which he described the song’s origins:

Conn and Silver, who had never written a song before, composed, “Yes! We Have No Bananas” when they were playing for Silver’s band at the Fountain Inn, a roadhouse near Lynbrook, Long Island, in the summer of 1923. The genesis of “Yes! We Have No Bananas” is a trifle foggy. Conn says the phrase was a favorite expression of a Greek who ran a fruit store in Lynbrook where Conn used to buy bananas…. Researchers at the time of the song’s great popularity discovered that the expression was first used by Tad, the cartoonist, in his “Indoor Sports” comic strip in the Evening Journal; the assumption is that the Greek picked it up there…. One day Silver suggested that the band ought to have a novelty number, so Conn sat down at the piano in an off hour and in ten minutes had thrummed out a tune, making up words as he went along. Both Conn and Silver tinkered with the words and music a while, and that night “Yes! We Have No Bananas” was played for the first time in the world at the Fountain Inn.

The articles—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—is available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issues.